Le Guin/Abish/Farber (Books 2.03.2017)

I picked up this handsome hardback collection of early Ursula K. LeGuin stories last Friday when I went to my local used bookshop. I was there looking for something else.

I wasn’t looking for stories by Walter Abish (and I can’t remember how or why I picked this up, but I read part of it in the store…I mean I can’t recall why I was in the “A’s” for Atwood or Abish):

And I wasn’t looking for essays by Jerry Farber (this weird mass market paperback was crammed into a completely wrong section—misshelved as if someone was trying to hide it. The font on the spine prompted me to pull it out, and I knew that the guy had written “The Student as Nigger”….I started reading “Why People Love Capitalism” and decided to pick it up):

What I was looking for was Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky, which is prominent on my to-read list after devouring The Stories of Paul Bowles. But I simply couldn’t come to terms with these covers:

I mean, look, I know I shouldn’t care about the cover, but these are dreadful, and it this point if I’m going to own a paper book, it needs to have some aesthetic merit. Aesthetic merit like the cover for this collection:

(I didn’t pick it up because the seven stories are in The Stories of Paul Bowles).

2 thoughts on “Le Guin/Abish/Farber (Books 2.03.2017)”

Sheltering Sky is truly worthy of its legacy. Avoid Bertolucci’s film. There is an excellent recording of Bowles performing spoken word readings from his work, including Sheltering Sky, called Baptism of Solitude. At the American Legation in Tangier there is a room dedicated to Bowles containing various artifacts from his life and career in Morocco. His typewriter is displayed on top of a stack of his well used luggage.